Reporters Far Afield Tap Into Technology

It was 2 a.m. on a steamy night in Jakarta, and a few dozen foreign correspondents, including a reporter for a new American Internet news service, positioned themselves outside the parliament building.

Near the main gate to the building, red-beret special forces troops engaged in a dangerous standoff with several thousand student demonstrators. Only a few days before in the raging Indonesian political crisis, six students were killed by troops on a nearby university campus.

In the context of late 20th century history, it was a fairly familiar scene: nervous troops, agitating students and hovering journalists poised for some denouement.

But at least for the older correspondents--men and women who over the years had covered assassinations, coups, invasions, tribal wars and the end of the Cold War--there was a sense, both exciting and somehow troubling, that an era had ended.

Practically everyone was plugged in.

For many Americans, the image of the foreign correspondent used to be one of exotic distance. It was Ernest Hemingway cabling dispatches from the Italian front. It was the great war correspondent Ernie Pyle fighting military censors to bring the American fighting man’s story to newspaper front pages.

Or, more recently, it was the sexy, overheated glamour of Mel Gibson in “The Year of Living Dangerously”--a film set in 1965 here in Jakarta. One of the main dramas in that film was how the television reporter played by Gibson could physically get his film to his network in Australia, where it might be aired days or even weeks after the actual events.

But in a relatively short time, the worldwide, computer-driven information revolution has radically altered the way foreign correspondents cover the world.

Television, inspired by CNN and the 24-hour news format, made the transition years ago with satellite technology.

But now, even the more technologically challenged newspaper correspondents are wired. Virtually every reporter standing outside the turtle-shaped parliament building in equatorial Jakarta, 8,971 miles from the California coast, carried a cell phone. Many were busy updating their stories to news desks in New York and Chicago, Paris and Sydney, Australia, as the events unfolded.

Newspaper photographers carried filmless digital cameras capable of instant computer transmission via laptop computers.

Laptops also connected some of the journalists to electronic databanks containing more information and background than all the libraries of all the newspapers in the world combined. It was at least theoretically possible to access this massive archive and check for names and relevant historical precedents while standing on the parliament grounds.

It’s not so much that the news has changed. It’s how it is collected and transmitted that is different.

Flashback to Bhopal, India, December 1984: Foreign correspondents from three big American newspapers stand outside the local Union Carbide office frantically composing incomplete stories on portable typewriters set up on the hood of a dilapidated taxi.

Bhopal, sleepy capital of a large state in central India, had no international phone lines. The reporters scramble to finish as much copy as they can about the deadly Union Carbide insecticide plant disaster, which killed thousands of sleeping slum dwellers, in time to “pigeon” it out with a colleague on the 3 p.m. flight to New Delhi.

Much later that night, wire service telex operators, some of whom did not speak English, retyped the messy sweat- and dirt-covered sheets of copy and sent the correspondents’ work to U.S. papers.

Outdrinking Rivals Often Ensured Success

Even in its romantic heyday, the job of foreign correspondent was usually more physical than mental.

The principal objective, often bordering on a compulsion, was how to physically get information home. In some places, this meant finding a cable office and sending off cryptic dispatches. In others, it meant pounding on the keys of telex machines that produced a coded tape for wiring stories out.

Newspapers called their foreign reporters “correspondents” or, more pretentiously, “envoys.”

The reporters usually referred to each other as “hacks,” a self-deprecating term that better described the drudgery of the work.

Reporters who had the endurance to stay up all night, small-talk and bribe telex operators and outdrink their sources and competitors usually had the upper hand.

“In Mogadishu [the capital of Somalia], after the now-forgotten Ogaden war,” recalled Los Angeles Times reporter David Lamb, a veteran of three decades as a foreign correspondent, “about 40 hacks showed up at the post office, which had the only two available telexes in the city. There was one puncher, and we bribed like hell to get at the head of the queue.”

But by 1992, when Dele Olojede began covering Africa for the Long Island-based newspaper Newsday, all that had changed. Between 1992 and 1997, Olojede traveled to 25 African countries and never once used a telex machine.

“I wouldn’t know what to do with one if you showed it to me,” Olojede said. But like other reporters of his generation, Olojede, 38, is extremely well versed in computer communication. When he was in Indonesia for the recent events, one of the first things he did was subscribe to a local Internet service.

In today’s high-tech journalism, the advantage often goes to the computer-savvy field journalist who can negotiate the Internet and organize the vast amounts of information it provides.

MSNBC Job Requires a Jack of All Trades

One of the foreign reporters standing outside the Indonesian parliament building was Kari Huus, a Seattle-based correspondent for MSNBC on the Internet, a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC News started in 1996. Huus, a China specialist, worked previously in Beijing and Hong Kong for Newsweek and National Public Radio.

But for the last two years, she has helped pioneer a new genre of foreign reporting, covering international stories for the MSNBC Web site (https://www.msnbc.com).

In some ways, Huus’ work is conventional. For example, like a newspaper reporter, she composes written copy in story form and sends it to her editors at the Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Wash. Also, much like a classic radio reporter, she records interviews and ambient sounds from major events. She also carries a still camera, the same as those used by professional photographers, and a video camera, not much different from those used by television crews.

What’s new is that Huus, who is sometimes accompanied by a technical producer, can combine all of these media in the same story. The tools of her trade are all digital--recorder, camera and video camera--and they allow her to instantly transmit what she has reported to MSNBC in Redmond via her laptop computer.

The result, which appears on the Web site, is a multimedia story that allows viewers--the industry term is “users”--to read, hear and view the event she is covering. The resulting report, called a “package,” contains highlighted hyperlinks that, if the Internet user clicks on them, can produce practically everything but the smell of the scene she is describing.

For example, her description of the riots in Jakarta that resulted in hundreds of deaths and billions of dollars in damage was accompanied by a hyperlink that allowed users equipped with the proper computers to view video of the riots taking place.

Moreover, what Huus does is interactive with the user. Of the 4 million people who MSNBC says check its site every month, MSNBC Editor in Chief Merrill Brown estimated, about 20% are overseas. Huus said that while she was reporting the Indonesian crisis, she was receiving instantaneous “user feedback” from people in Indonesia, commenting on her stories and even offering tips about other stories.

Such intimacy would have been unimaginable to the older foreign correspondents, who often filed their stories not knowing if they ever reached the home office. There are countless examples of correspondents working blissfully away, pounding out story after story from some remote setting, only to learn later that they had never been sent or were dispatched to the wrong country or newspaper.

This devastating information usually came in a cryptic cable from an obviously peeved editor: “Why you unfile?”

Linguistic Concoction Fooled Congo Censors

Stanley Meisler, veteran Associated Press and Los Angeles Times reporter, recalled that when he started out as a foreign correspondent in Africa in the late 1960s, he spent as much as one-third of his working hours trying to figure out how to get his copy to Los Angeles.

“My adventures in Kinshasa in the Congo illustrate the problem,” Meisler said recently.

One day, he said, a Congolese security chief “announced that all copy must now be sent in French, evidently so the censors could read it as it clattered through the telex machines. I puzzled over this for some time.

“The late Henry Tanner of the New York Times, who was born in Switzerland and based in Paris, tried to console me. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘I’ll help you put it into good French.’

“ ‘But that’s the point, Henry,’ I said. ‘What good does good French do my foreign desk?’

“After much thought, I concocted a new language of my own in which all the nouns were in French and all the verbs in English. I would write and send by telex sentences like these: ‘Les mercenaires are shooting up le congo aujourd’hui.’

“My concoction worked. The Congolese censors were satisfied with my French, and the foreign desk figured out more or less what I was trying to say, and the stories appeared in print more or less the way I intended them to look.

“But I could not reach the office by phone and could only hint in my telex messages what was going on. For a week, I sent my cables in this Meisler concoction of French and English, and for a week I received sarcastic cables from Los Angeles congratulating me on my incredible grasp of the nuances of the French language.”

Just a few years ago, what correspondents filed was mostly what they already knew in terms of background or what they personally witnessed in their day of reporting.

Archive Service Offers 100 Million Articles

Contrast that with today, when field correspondents usually have computer access to massive databanks such as those operated by Dow Jones, Reuters and Lexis-Nexis.

Reuters, which operates the Reuters Business Briefing database, offers an archive going back 10 years that includes stories and materials from 4,000 sources, including newspapers, business magazines, trade journals, company reports and government briefings.

Dow Jones Interactive gives reporters access to the archives of 5,500 newspapers containing 100 million articles. Dow Jones also offers a service where computers will electronically “clip” bylines of selected reporters so correspondents can see every day what their competitors have written.

Critics complain that this system, supplemented by near universal access to 24-hour cable and satellite news such as that on CNN, produces reams of homogenous copy, as competitors read the same material and often produce similar stories. But other observers contend that foreign correspondents were never that original anyway.

“Now they get the same information from databanks,” said James McGregor, a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who is now an executive in China for Dow Jones. “Before, they got the same information from each other in bars.”

But courage, strength and street smarts still play an important role in what foreign correspondents do.

And even with the technological advances, communication with the home office can still go terribly wrong.

MSNBC correspondent Huus remembered one recent nightmarish experience in the Philippines, when she had trouble keeping her computer connection with the Internet. Her laptop had run out of battery power, and the power source in her hotel room was on the opposite side of the room from the telephone.

Stretching her computer power line and telephone line to their full lengths, Huus sat in the middle of the floor holding her computer in her lap. “I kept losing my connections,” she said. “Finally, I fell asleep on the floor on top of my computer.” Her story never made it out.

Times staff writers Stanley Meisler in Washington and Hanoi Bureau Chief David Lamb in Jakarta contributed to this report.